Notre Dame’s 10-2 season both a disappointment and a success

Notre Dame’s 10-2 season both a disappointment and a success

STANFORD, Calif. — After Conrad Ukropina wrote himself into the darker pages of Notre Dame lore in Saturday’s 38-36 loss to Stanford, a dismal reality set in for the Irish.

Make one more play against Clemson, and maybe Notre Dame wins that game in Death Valley Oct. 3. Stop Devon Cajuste from gouging out 27 yards, or score a touchdown instead of a field goal one or two more times in the red zone, and Notre Dame would’ve taken a happy flight home from the Bay Area.

But that bleak, unfulfilling outlook is juxtaposed with this one: Notre Dame won 10 games despite suffering a dozen significant injuries over the course of the season, highlighted by losing its starting nose guard (Jarron Jones), its starting quarterback (Malik Zaire) and its starting running back (Tarean Folston) before the end of Week 2. Cornerback Shaun Crawford, safety Avery Sebastian, tight end Durham Smythe, safety Drue Tranquill, offensive lineman Alex Bars, wide receiver Equanimeous St. Brown, linebacker James Onwualu, running back C.J. Prosise and cornerback KeiVarae Russell were the other injured players who didn’t play on Saturday at Stanford.

“(I) couldn't be more proud of the way our kids competed, overcame some catastrophic injuries to key players,” coach Brian Kelly said. “Quarterbacks, running backs, tight ends, defensive linemen, cornerbacks. I mean, we're talking about across the board here, we're not just talking about one position, we're talking about impacting all positions.”

Notre Dame’s depth and resiliency were its strengths, with DeShone Kizer emerging not only as a capable quarterback in place of Zaire, but a talented player with plenty of room to grow. He struggled to turn red zone opportunities into six points for most of the season, but will head into Notre Dame’s bowl game — which is likely to either be the Fiesta Bowl or Peach Bowl — with 28 total touchdowns. The redshirt freshman’s season might be the single most impressive individual success story of the Kelly era.

Josh Adams, the lightly-recruited true freshman running back, rushed for 168 yards and a touchdown against Stanford to give him four games with at least 130 yards in his first collegiate season. If Prosise and Folston return to Notre Dame for the 2016 season, the wealth of talent at Autry Denson’s disposal could rival or surpass that of the quarterback depth chart (Zaire, Kizer, Brandon Wimbush).

Defensively, the back-end losses of Crawford, Sebastian, Tranquill and Russell were harder to overcome for a secondary that proved to be the weak link of this team. But Notre Dame compensated for it by revving an offensive engine that, in its final regular season game, averaged 8.9 yards per play against a middling, but not bad, Stanford defense.

“For us to come up short of our goal is very disappointing, but man am I proud to be a part of this,” Kizer said. “A 10-win season is very successful and when you have the goals set as high as we did, it looks like a disappointment, but as of now you kind of have to understand, there’s probably a really good chance we’re going to play in a really good bowl game. There’s probably a good chance that we’re going to go out and prove that we still are one of the better teams in the country. And we might not have the opportunity to play for a national championship but we’re going to take the opportunities the are given to us and make sure we make the best of them.”

In all reality, it probably didn’t matter what Notre Dame did Saturday night in Stanford for the team’s playoff hopes. Oklahoma salted the earth Saturday in Stillwater, beating Bedlam rival Oklahoma State by five touchdowns to all but book its trip to the College Football Playoff. The Big Ten is getting either Iowa or Michigan State in the playoff, so it would’ve taken Clemson being upset by North Carolina or Alabama being upset by Florida — both varying levels of being longshots — for Notre Dame to back into the four-team tournament.

Had Notre Dame not allowed Stanford to kick that game-winning field goal and finished 11-1, it still would’ve had no one else to blame for missing the playoff than itself. While it came a few plays away from beating Clemson, it made loads of mistakes in that game, ones that would’ve haunted this team as it found itself shut out of an opportunity to win the school’s first title since 1988.

But it’s also so easy to flip from the glass-half-empty to glass-half-full view of Notre Dame’s season. It missed enough opportunities to lose two games, but also put together one of the remarkable seasons of Kelly’s six-year tenure. There’s a lot to be frustrated about as Notre Dame heads back to South Bend, but there’s also a lot to proud of as the curtain falls on a disappointing, yet successful, regular season.

“Deep down, we’re all definitely proud of what we’ve achieved,” linebacker Jaylon Smith said. “… But it’s never a good feeling when you lose. Any competitor can’t be happy after a loss.”

Is Brian Kelly out at Notre Dame if new QB Brandon Wimbush’s rocket arm doesn’t deliver for Irish in 2017?

Is Brian Kelly out at Notre Dame if new QB Brandon Wimbush’s rocket arm doesn’t deliver for Irish in 2017?

A 4-8 season in 2016 has put Notre Dame head coach Brian Kelly firmly on the hot seat as he heads into his eighth season with the Fighting Irish.

In response to a tumultuous season, Kelly made major changes to his staff this past offseason by hiring new coordinators on both sides of the ball.

Mike Elko, who previously led Wake Forest to an FBS Top-40 total defense ranking, was hired by Kelly to be Notre Dame's defensive coordinator, and Chip Long — former offensive coordinator at Memphis — will now be in charge of the Fighting Irish offense.

However, the biggest change and arguably the No. 1 factor in Kelly's long-term future in South Bend, will be the person under center in 2017.

Barring an unforeseen circumstance, junior quarterback Brandon Wimbush — a former Rivals four-star recruit — will lead Notre Dame out of the tunnel in Week 1 vs. Temple.

Wimbush has only thrown five passes during his time at Notre Dame, but showed what kind of talent he has with a 58-yard rushing touchdown as a freshman in 2015.

I’m a big fan of Wimbush but that hasn’t always been the case. It’s not that I didn’t like him when I first scouted him before his high school career took off, but what I saw way back when was a kid who had a rocket arm and zero touch. But throughout his high school career he improved every time I saw him, showed much more than just a strong arm and flashed impressive poise for his age.

I’ve seen very limited action when it comes to Wimbush in college as he hasn’t played often and his spring game performance had ups and downs, but I believe in this kid’s ability. He can extend the play, has that great arm and just needs to get comfortable in the Notre Dame offense and make sure he doesn’t try to use that cannon to fit the ball into tight spots. I can see him having some growing pains this season, but as he gets more comfortable and learns to take what the defense gives him while keeping defenses off balance with his athletic ability, I think he’ll finish strong.

Two views of Notre Dame's 2017 signing day class

Two views of Notre Dame's 2017 signing day class

After a handful of late additions sent in their national letters of intent to the Guglielmino Athletics Complex, Notre Dame on Wednesday announced its 21-player recruiting class of 2017. There are a couple of ways to view the end of what was a volatile recruiting period for the Irish:

The glass-half-full take:

Two and a half months after wrapping up an embarrassing 4-8 season, Notre Dame's 2017 recruiting class ranks 11th by 247 Sports, 13th by Rivals, 13th by Scout and 16th by ESPN. In fact, Notre Dame actually ranks higher this year in 247 Sports' composite rankings (11th) than it did in 2016 (15th), when the Irish were coming off a 10-win season and a Fiesta Bowl berth.

Nearly scraping together a top-10 class after going 4-8 and losing four assistant coaches in Mike Sanford, Mike Denbrock, Scott Booker and Keith Gilmore is an impressive feat (Greg Hudson was only an interim defensive coordinator, and Brian VanGorder was far from a reliable recruiter). Plenty of kudos should be extended the way of recruiting coordinator/defensive line coach Mike Elston for heading up the program's efforts to keep what began as a pretty strong class from disintegrating.

Additionally, coach Brian Kelly pointed to the work of the 15 verbally-committed players who stuck with their pledges even as Notre Dame sustained a string of confounding losses and significant coaching turnover.

"We couldn't be where we are today unless we had 15 student-athletes that were committed to Notre Dame from the start to the finish," Kelly said. "Really during a very difficult season, this group of 15 really had to endure the things that would occur out there in recruiting during a very difficult season. Other schools reminding them about a very difficult season that we had. Then there was them sticking together because of why they wanted to come to Notre Dame."

Five of those players enrolled early — tight end Brock Wright, offensive linemen Robert Gainsay and Aaron Banks, running back C.J. Holmes and safety Isaiah Robertson, all of whom 247 sports rated as four-star recruits — and guys like tight end Cole Kmet, quarterback Avery Davis and offensive linemen Joshua Lugg never wavered, too.

That those players stuck together helped Notre Dame maintain a good base after the NCAA-mandated dead period lifted after the College Football Playoff title game last month, and new coaches Brian Polian, Mike Elko, Clark Lea, Chip Long and DelVaughn Alexander were able to bring in six late additions to the class: safety Jordan Genmark Heath, wide receiver Jafar Armstrong, kicker Jonathan Doerer, defensive lineman Myron Tagovailoa, linebacker Jeremiah Owusu-Koramoah and defensive lineman Kofi Wardlow.

Armstrong, Tagovailoa and Wardlow all filled red-line positions of need, while adding more players to increase the pool of talent available to Elko is hardly a bad thing.

But the optimistic viewpoint here is the deck was stacked against Notre Dame in recruiting, and they actually turned out a pretty good hand thanks to a complete effort from everyone in the athletic department.

"In a lot of instances he had to be there to support our football program and talk to recruits about where this program is and where it's going. There are questions when a family comes on campus. He reminded them about the investment we were making in staff and what we were doing for the present and for the future. So having Jack's involvement in this was absolutely crucial to get to where we are."

Now, for the glass-half-empty take:

Notre Dame had six players decommit, five of whom were at positions of need (defensive line, cornerback, wide receiver). Only four-star defensive end Robert Beal jumped ship before Notre Dame's fall tailspin was underway, and four of those six decommitting players were four-star recruits.

Notre Dame wound up replacing them with six late commitments, but five of those late-deciding players were three-star recruits and one (Doerner) was a two-star player. That's a good recipe for slipping from having a top-10 class to one on the outside looking in.

A common lament among fans is that Notre Dame has struggled to sign five-star recruits lately, and while it's true the Irish haven't done that since 2013 — Jaylon Smith and Max Redfield, as rated by 247 Sports — that's not as big an issue as it may seem. Just look at the disparity in college success between Smith and Redfield as a front-and-center example of how a five-star rating doesn't guarantee success in college. Signing more four/five-star recruits than two/three-star ones is far more important (more on that in a bit).

But the bigger issue with Notre Dame's 2017 class perhaps has more to do with its 2016 class. Notre Dame lost ace recruiters Tony Alford and Kerry Cooks after the 2014 season and re-worked its entire recruiting operation in response, which led to little oomph in a 2016 class that, based on the prior season, should've been much better than it was.

Last year's group could ultimately build a legacy as a less-heralded crop of recruits that went on to success — the strong debuts of 247 Sports three-stars in cornerback Julian Love and wide receiver Kevin Stepherson were good starts — but there's a long way to go there.

If 2016 was supposed to be a more transitional recruiting class, though, then 2017 represents a massive missed opportunity. Going 4-8 with all the right recruiting machinations in place is a glaring shortcoming for the future of the program — even a nine-win season could've allowed Notre Dame to hang on to some of those four-star players it lost and earn a top-10 class ranking.

The last two recruiting cycles have been, in that context, significant disappointment. While strong classes in 2014 and 2015 could prop up a playoff run as soon as this fall, the future of the program may not be on solid footing even if the Irish engineer a major turnaround in 2017. Next year's class likely will be critical to the long-term success of the program under Kelly, presuming he's still around to usher in the next group of recruits in February of 2018.